1. Students talk a lot
As much possible of the period of time allotted to the activity is in fact occupied by student talk. This may seems obvious, but often most time is
taken up with teacher talk or pauses.
2. Participation is even
Classroom discussion is not dominated by talkative participants: all get to change to speak and contribution are fairly evenly distributed.
3. Motivation is high
Students are eager to speak: because they are interested in the topic and have something new to say about it, or they want to contribute in achieving the task
objective.
4. Language is of an acceptable level
Students express themselves in utterances that are relevant, easily comprehensible each other, and of an acceptable level of language accuracy.
2.4 Problems with Speaking Activity
Problems with speaking activity according to “storytelling in the EFL speaking class
room article” can be concluded as follows:
a. The Students Are Nervous and Afraid of Making Mistakes.
To get high scores in the Higher Education Exam is nearly the only goal of the high school students. For some reason, there is no oral English test in the Higher
Education Exam; thus speaking skills are often neglected. More over, since there are
usually over 50 students in each class, the students have little chance to practice speaking in class. This leads to the result that the speaking skills of most students are
comparatively lower than other skills such as listening, reading and grammar.
Secondly, the fear of losing face prevents the students from speaking English Zhu, 2003. Face is still of great importance to most Chinese. On the one hand, it motivates
people to work hard to win face; on the other, people tend to conceal their mistakes and weaknesses for fear of losing face. For many English learners, they believe if
they make mistakes or fail to find suitable words to express themselves, they will lose face. To protect themselves from being laughed at, they are reluctant to speak
English. So there is the vicious circle: the less they speak, the less they improve their speaking skills, and the more they are afraid of speaking.
b. The Topics Are Not Interesting.
The dominating oral English teaching materials focus on situational orand communicative function Chen 2004, aiming to enable students to cope, in the target
language, with typical situations in school and work environments as well as in ordinary life. When practical is the prime principle, what the learners do most in the
speaking classroom is to make dialogues according to the given situations or topics. However, students often complain that they have been repeatedly asked to introduce
their families or schools; talk about their hobbies or majors; make dialogues on topics such as job interviews, meeting visitors or shopping. These practical topics and
situations provide little space for the students to imagine and create; therefore,
dialogues on these situational topics are hard to develop in depth and width. People tend to lose interest in what they learn if they find they make little progress.
Another problem with this kind of topic-based speaking training is you cant expect all the listeners to be interested in your hobby or major. Moreover, the other students
in the classroom are talking about similar things, which could hardly offer anything new to each other. Consequently, the audiences in the speaking classroom are not
very attentive and the speakers just make a perfunctory effort instead of getting involved, not even to mention enjoying it. To many of them, the job is just a job.
c. The Classroom Atmosphere Is Not Encouraging.
Kategori